Don't Talk to Strangers

A Novel

"A killer is targeting rural Georgia, and the police look to Keye for help before another victim is claimed. But if the bodies are to be believed, Keye may be up against a very experienced predator--and is putting herself in line to be his next prey. She goes to the country, ninety miles outside of Atlanta, where the bodies of young women have been found in the woods. The remains are as fresh as six months ago, as far back in the past as a decade. The local police call Keye in to give them a psychological profile. She and her team venture out of the city to try to catch a master predator who has been hunting human prey for a very long time, and has no intention of stopping now..."--Publisher.

Don't Talk to Strangers leaves me torn. I pretty well disliked the narrator, but enjoyed the plot.

Keye Street uses simile way, way, WAY too often. She also talks about her recovering alcoholism so often, in the same repeated phrases, that it became whinging. And she overlooked some pretty obvious things (to me, anyway), although I'm happy to put that down to basic human error.

On the positive side of things, the killer ended up being a surprise to me until Chapter 43 or so. I was convinced it was a specific person, and even when that person was ruled out, I was convinced Keye just hadn't dug far enough. So I was pleasantly surprised to be surprised!

I wouldn't call this thrilling, not until the very end anyway. It was like watching an episode of NCIS, if one person handled everything (including the boy scout 1-dimensional sheriff). It was probably more realistic than most ex-FBI criminal psychologist-based crime novels, given that Keye relied heavily on a hacker, the sheriff's department doing all the physical labor, and what seemed to me like a common sense approach to how a killer might think.

I'd recommend it for fans of non-traditional crime novels, serial killer thrillers, diversity in novels, and hardboiled/noir novels. And if you find Keye annoying, like I did- stick with it. It gets better.